The following is a press release issued by the County of Mendocino:
Community Bear Stories will be held in the Mendocino County Museum Wonacott Room and Courtyard, Friday, July 29 from 6:00 – 8:00 pm.
Come enjoy some s’mores and an evening of bear stories with guest storytellers, including Susan Snyder, author of Bear in Mind: The Story of the California Grizzly. Also joining us is Laura L. Smith, who has been a Mendocino County resident for 40 years, dedicating 20 of those years as a Federal Park Ranger at Lake Mendocino, where she has had many positive black bear encounters to share.
After our featured storytellers, community members are invited to share their own bear tales, poems, or songs. Please limit time to 10 minutes or less.
This event is free to the public, open to all ages, and is sponsored by the Friends of the Mendocino County Museum and Mendocino County Museum.
For more information, please visit www.mendocinocounty.org/museum or contact the Mendocino County Museum at museum@mendocinocounty.org or 707-459-2736.
Yes we need bears especially Grizzly Bears in California
Good Children’s Lesson
HELENA, Mont. (AP) — A California woman who was fatally mauled by a grizzly bear in western Montana last summer was the victim of a rare predatory attack by a bear that had learned to seek out human food and was likely attracted scents near her tent and others left behind from recent Independence Day picnics, wildlife officials said.
Leah Davis Lokan, 65, of Chico, was pulled out of her tent and mauled in the pre-dawn hours of July 6, 2021 in the small town of Ovando, along the banks of the Blackfoot River, made famous by the movie “A River Runs Through It.” The town borders a huge expanse of forested land that is home to an estimated 1,000 grizzlies.
About an hour before the mauling, the bear had approached the tents of Lokan and a Texas couple who were camping behind a museum. They were able to scare the bear away.
Lokan, a retired nurse, told the couple that the bear “huffed at my head,” according to the incident report by the Interagency Grizzly Bear Committee’s Board of Review. The report determined the grizzly was what is known as a “food-conditioned” bear, which means it had learned to find human food.
Lokan declined an offer to go sleep at a hotel where her sister and their friend were staying, investigators reported. The women were participating in a long-anticipated bike ride along the Great Divide Mountain Bike route.
After the first encounter, Lokan took some packaged snack foods and dry lentils out of her tent and retrieved a can of bear spray, the investigation found.
However, her toiletries — in two bags that had previously held dried blueberries and still smelled like berries — remained in the tent, investigators said. She had food stored in the saddle bags of her bicycle, about 10 feet (3 meters) away from her tent, the report said.
The Texas couple awakened just after 4 a.m. to noises that indicated Lokan was being attacked. The man yelled at the bear and deployed his pepper spray after seeing the bruin “pouncing up and down” on Lokan and her tent.
The 417-pound (189 kilogram) male grizzly bear broke her neck and severed her spine, an autopsy found, causing instantaneous death. A nearly empty can of bear spray that appeared to have been recently deployed was found under her tent, officials said.
Remember Kids they are not Yogi nor Boo Boo they are Wild Animals
Lone, predatory black bears responsible for most human attacks
By Doug O’Harra
Most fatal attacks by North American black bears during the past century were conducted by lone, male animals that stalked and then killed their human victims as prey, according to a new study by the world’s top authority on what triggers bear attacks.
Though black bears rarely kill or seriously injure people, when they do, it’s most often the result of predatory behavior by males inside their wilderness home ranges and not by females protecting cubs or animals defending a carcass, said Dr. Stephen Herrero, professor emeritus at the University of Calgary and author of the classic Bear Attacks: Their Causes and Avoidance.
“Most fatal black bear attacks were predatory and all fatal attacks were carried out by a single bear,” Herrero said in a U-Cal story. “With training, people can learn to recognize the behavior of a bear that is considering them as prey and deter an attack by taking aggressive action such as fighting back.”